This country is suffering from perpetual gun violences, mass shootings, and gun suicides. The nation's ongoing debate over gun controls versus gun ownership rights are ugly conflicts that cost so many innocent lives every single day. While America should work hard to completely abolish its pervasive gun culture deeply rooted in Colonialism, its strategies for reducing gun deaths must be age, gender, race, and community specific.
This project is to visualize the U.S. firearm mortality between 2018 and 2021 to uncover causes of gun deaths by age, race, and gender. It is also to visualize the association between U.S. county poverty rates and firearm mortality, particularly gun homicides & suicides.
Link to my project site: https://klarakang.github.io/DATA780Final/
My code repo:https://github.com/KlaraKang/DATA780Final
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The Center for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics: Mortality Data (https://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd.html)
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The U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) Program:
Historical Dataset of the U.S. poverty rate by state and county (https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/saipe/datasets/)
- Gun suicide and gun homicide were the two leading causes of gun-related deaths in the U.S. between 2018 and 2021.
- The young adults aged between 15 and 34 had the highest gun-related deaths among all age groups during those years, majority of them by gun-homicide.
- The older age groups have higher gun-suicide rates than gun-homicide rates.
- Black males aged between 15 and 34 years old are the most vulnerable to gun homicide, while White males aged between 55 and 64 years old are the most vulnerable to gun suicide.